—Recent descriptions of Donald Trump from various sections of the US liberal and socialist Left

We’re at that stage of the US presidential electoral cycle when red-faced commentators are admitting they might have underestimated Donald Trump’s chances a little. A quick glance at the last six months of polling (see graph below) shows how inexorable Trump’s rise in the Republican Party race has been, upending predictions he would fizzle out or self-destruct. Among politicos of all stripes, that rise is now provoking anxiety verging on panic.

Behind the surprise over Trump’s sustained success lies a deeper confusion over his political strategy and the context that he is taking advantage of. There is a tendency — concentrated on the Left but also in many conservative analyses — to overstate how radically right-wing he is on issues and to then presume that his support must reflect some kind of significant radicalisation on the Right of US politics and society.

In this blog post, I want to start to unpick some of these arguments. It is my contention that Trump’s success occurs not because of a significant social radicalisation to the Right but because of discontent with the representative political system among Republican voters — and voters in general. In the case of the GOP, the party’s problems are reflected in the fact it has only won one presidential election in the 27 years since Bush senior won in 1988 (2000 doesn’t count; Dubya lost the election but won the Supreme Court). As party identification has waned in the US, the remaining GOP-identifying voters have become increasingly angry with the party leadership over a wide range of policy and political issues, including the constant “rinse, repeat” of the RNC’s failed electoral strategy. More generally, disaffection with politics-as-usual has reached fever pitch across the political spectrum.

The long-term and growing disillusionment in GOP ranks has provoked a series of rebellions, with the Tea Party insurgency the best known. Yet many politicos and commentators made the mistake of presuming that everyone drawn to the anti-government ravings of Tea Party activists agreed with their hard ideological mindset, rather than the Tea Party mostly tapping into already-existing fury at the Republican establishment.

Similarly, Sarah Palin’s greatest successes have been as an anti-establishment figure (e.g. when she first came to notice in Alaska) rather than when tied to a mainstream election campaign (such as in 2008) or trying to hitch her political wagon too closely to various hard Right blocs in the party.

In case it needs spelling out, in speeches and in his manifesto, Crippled America, Trump argues for: protectionist trade policies as part of massively reinvigorating industrial production to create quality jobs; vaguely defined tax cuts and changes to the tax code to promote growth; more funding for schools and health services; replacing Obamacare with a system that brings the insurance companies to heel (until recently he’d even supported single-payer); and rebuilding crumbling infrastructure. It’s a fairly traditional populist, government-led pitch of growing the economy (and the government) out of its problems — and the popularity of the pitch overturns the myth that the disaffected Republican base was dominated by Tea Party style politics.

On foreign policy, while he has joined the generally hawkish drift of the GOP and promised to build military strength and wipe out ISIS, Trump’s position is complicated by sharp criticism of US adventurism in the Middle East, well summed up in what he said at the GOP debate in Las Vegas on 15 December:

We have done a tremendous disservice not only to the Middle East — we’ve done a tremendous disservice to humanity. The people that have been killed, the people that have been wiped away — and for what? It’s not like we had victory. It’s a mess. The Middle East is totally destabilized, a total and complete mess. I wish we had the $4 trillion or $5 trillion [spent trying to topple regimes]. I wish it were spent right here in the United States on schools, hospitals, roads, airports, and everything else that are all falling apart!

Playing to right-wing anti-politics in Iowa

Trump the anti-politician

So if Trump is generally a political moderate and not an ideologically pure right-winger, how to explain his immigration and border policies, which are the harshest of any candidate? They make most sense as part of Trump’s anti-politics — his blistering critique of the current political class as inept, bought-off, beholden to corporate donors, and too ineffectual to take the decisive action needed to fix America’s problems.

His critique of political class failure (on both sides of the aisle) is multi-faceted but includes:

Their bungled deal-making both in terms of repeated Congressional deadlock because of political squabbling, and in negotiations with other countries in which the US ends up getting a bad outcome (for example, trade with China and the Iran nuclear weapons deal)

Their hiding behind spin and convoluted policy positions that they know they can’t deliver

Their covering up of paralysis by deferring to unelected bureaucracies (like the judiciary)

Trump’s response to political class failure is to portray himself as a non-politician who can overcome them to get results both because he is an outsider to political pay-offs, lobbying and game-playing, and because he has a proven track record as a strong, flexible dealmaker who has built a respected real estate, hotel and luxury brand empire. Crippled America sets out his twin claims — the failure of the politicians contrasted with his successful track record of strength and deal making — in the same chaotic, rambling, angry, peppered-with-asides-and-digressions style that characterises his public speeches. Given the media’s predominant focus, it is remarkable how little time he spends in his speeches on the outrageous policies and statements that he uses to attract media outrage (a media strategy that goes right back to his bestselling business book, Art of the Deal).

Two further aspects of his pitch are worth noting. First, his obsessive reporting of his opinion poll results further cements the idea that his non-politician approach is a winner in the world of politics also. Notably he refuses to commission polling and focus groups of his own, which he attacks as part of the unreality of modern politics. Secondly, his refusal to admit when he has been caught out making stuff up reinforces the idea that he would be a strong leader who wouldn’t apologise for the United States. With both tactics he further underlines the chasm between himself and the politicians he derides.

It is this aggressively anti-political stance, and not his alleged radicalism, which has really unsettled his opponents and led them to claim he operates beyond the bounds of acceptable politics.

But why does he not use other — that is, less racialised — issues to make his pitch? Firstly, because illegal immigration and Islamist terrorism have long been issues dominated by politicking, spin, and hypocrisy, but which politicians have failed to find solutions to (for example, “pro-immigrant” Obama deports more people annually than any previous US president). Thus, such issues give Trump concrete examples with which to make his more general claims about the weakness of the political class. Secondly, with issues this politically charged the possibility of attracting attention by causing an uproar is simply too good to pass up. Finally, Trump is running for the Republican and not the Democratic nomination, so he has to appeal to the debates that have caused havoc within that party. Nevertheless, the intractability of these issues means that voters are likely to hold contradictory positions on them and so it is the political decisiveness of Trump’s position rather than his (often contradictory) policy detail that will stand out.

The reaction to Trump — with its attendant confusion, hyperbole, posturing and singling out the billionaire to protest above all the other candidates — highlights how unprepared the Left is for the possibility of him being nominated and what the consequences of that might be. At one level Trump is a product of similar disaffection with politics that has allowed Bernie Sanders to stay (and make significant ground) in the race against Hillary Clinton. But whereas Sanders represents a political class strategy to overcome the crisis of US politics with an unusually progressive populist policy pitch, Trump is the “chaos candidate” — an outsider unafraid to name political class weakness and light a bonfire under it. Just look at his response to Tea Partier Cruz’s attacks on him for having (liberal) “New York values”: smacking down Cruz for being “in bed with Wall Street” and “owned” by NYC-based Citibank and Goldman Sachs, whose campaign loans he’d forgotten to report. Similarly, Trump’s attacks on Clinton include targeting how her ties to noxious sexists contradict her stated commitment to women’s rights. In addition, as his position has strengthened, Trump has started to soften his pitch and one can watch long speeches and interviews where his border policies are largely passed over in favour of positive economic messaging and vicious critiques of foreign policy disasters caused by Democrats and Republicans alike.

All this suggests it is way too early to be sure that a Democratic nominee can easily beat Trump. Equally, a Trump victory should not be considered hard proof of a deeper right-wing shift in US society, or even a significant section of it. What a Trump nomination is bound to bring, however, is an escalation of the panicked histrionics of a political class whose crisis may be about to pass some kind of tortured tipping point.

Nice article. It does seem helpful to think about the current political scene in the U.S. in terms of what Jurgen Habermas described as a crisis of legitimacy. The traditional political class appears to have lost its grip and in its place we find Trump able to fuel his candidacy through his mastery of kayfabe political theater.

It’s not easy to see where this is leading. A crisis of legitimacy seems unlike most other events and circumstances we are familiar with in our every day lives. Once the word gets out that the emperor has no clothes it becomes much more difficult for us to pretend the situation is otherwise. Importing WWF theatrics into our political arena may account for Trump’s popularity but it hardly seems to offer us a route to restore legitimacy in our political order. Rather, it’s seems much more likely that the crisis will only worsen if the kayfabe theatrics that Trump has unleashed on the political arena soon begin to spill over into government, finance and law.

I think the issue is that while Trump takes advantage of and exacerbates the crisis of political legitimacy, there is not much evidence that the crisis will automatically spill over to a crisis of other social institutions (although the police are now increasingly under pressure because of various urban black uprisings that have punctuated the last year or two).

The problem for the established political class is that currently it has no other way out of its predicament, but whether or not Trump wins that class will need to reformulate its relationship to the rest of society if it is not to continue having these problems. An outsider like Trump offers one (temporary, unstable) way to do this. Maybe over time other politicians will find new ways to rejig things — although at least on the GOP side they seem terribly stuck.

I hafta say my noodle strains when I try to comprehend what legitimacy entails in this context. Perceived legitimacy? It reminds me of discussions in philosophy, where I not only don’t understand the nomenclature, but the concepts are out of my reach.

As the article nicely and you clarify, politics has been exposed in a way that is unique enough to result in thriving candidate Don. My question is, is he the one employing kayfabe, or is he the one having chosen not to? I think the latter. As even media surveys repeatedly reveal, representatives act consistently against the wishes of the working class and instead at the behest of a client base. I hardly find legitimacy in that, democratically speaking.

To amend: It’s not that I think he isn’t kayfabing some brand of populism, he just seems able to have done it in a way that capitalizes on the illegitimacy of his forebears. In intelligence speak it’s akin to a “limited hangout”.

I do, however, suggest that you are completely wrong about immigration. Unchecked immigration – legal or illegal – drives wages down for the many and drives profits up for the few. Yes, there are any number of economic whores who claim that the law of supply and demand does not apply to the labor market, and any number of fake-liberals who have been paid to say that moderating the rate at which foreign nationals are allowed to come here so that wages aren’t driven down or crowding increased, is racism, but the reality is the opposite. Trump’s position on illegal immigration is the same as that of FDR and Samuel Gompers – it is the classic progressive position, before ‘liberals’ decided to sell out and support anti-worker trade and immigration policies and flack only about gay marriage.

It’s kind of tiring to keep hearing that wanting the United States to protect it’s borders is racist, and I think Americans are getting tired of this. Call me a racist, I just don’t care. And that too, is part of Trump’s appeal.

Suppose that I demanded that you take the locks off the doors of your house, and that anybody who wanted to could just walk in and help themselves to all that you had. Soon your house would be full of a lot of low-life, and even the decent people would be making you poorer through sheer numbers. And no, a bunch of poor people swarming into your house does NOT automatically turn it into a 30-story luxury apartment building. You complain, and I just attack you as an ugly racist and threaten to have you blacklisted from your job. At some point you wouldn’t take that any more, would you?

I’ve caught a lot of flack on the Left for arguing that Trump’s border policy is not racist. I do think it is nationalist, but that doesn’t separate it from deporter-in-chief Obama’s approach. The argument is simply over how lax or tight the control of national borders should be, and the Left’s cries of “racism” are more to do with their panic at Trump’s message cutting through … Easier to blame the dark racist impulses of the voters than to think through what Trump is really about.

I disagree with your more general position on borders (I’m not a nationalist, and I think the evidence about jobs and wages leans towards my support for ending all immigration controls). But that’s not really the issue here. Trump is saying to voters — almost all of whom support national borders and the American nation — that he will pragmatically fix the problem, even if it means being super-harsh. When you compare that to the mixed messages sent by the rest of the political class (“yes we want strong borders, but…”) it is simply Trump being a consistent defender of immigration controls.

Really interesting food for thought as to why Trump is and remains popular among people who are not ideologically left wing and don’t dismiss him instantly because of his outlanding statements about Muslims and immigration.

We of the left can definitely be guilty of being dismissive of those tagged as “racist” or “facist” without nuance. During this interminable election campaign, I’ve had no doubt as a lefty that Trump is vastly preferable to Cruz and anecdotally have encountered an increasing number of people who say they want to vote for either Sanders or Trump – demonstrating the desire to go for the anti-establishment candidate rather than based on right wing or left wing ideology.

[…] all of this. In the lead up to his election and in subsequent reflections upon his success, writer Tad Tietze identified Trump as an ‘anti-politician’. Tietze suggests that we can unravel ‘the Trump paradox’ by seeing Trump as a […]